Firms spring up around Denver to teach students to become coders

Unmet demand is leading to new businesses opening in the Denver area that aim to fill the tech industry’s need for skilled software programmers.

The businesses emphasize, in different ways, finding or training new programming talent and addressing a long-standing shortage of software writers able to fill available jobs.

The DaVinci Institute, a 15-year-old, Louisville-based futurism think tank, in June started 11-week intensive classes in the Ruby On Rails programming language used in a lot of online software. The courses cost $6,000 and are meant to make someone starting from scratch to become proficient in Ruby on Rails programming, and to make contacts with area software professionals.

It’s more hands-on, and a more specific skill than is taught in academic computer science programs, said Tom Frey, DaVinci Institute founder.

“They spend a lot of time teaching theory and not much coding; we spend only a little on theory and much more on coding,” he said. “You’re not only rebooting your skills, you’re rebooting your social circles, and that’s a powerful thing.”

DaVinci Coders provides classroom instruction and pairs programming students with mentors from several local tech companies. The mentorship and 30 to 40 hours of weekly course work outside the classroom are meant to make DaVinci Coders worthwhile for people intent on quickly putting what they learn to use.

DaVinci Coders’ second session started Sept. 24 with 19 students. A similar number took the first session, Frey said, and a few who graduated in August have gotten jobs already.

The demand for teaching programming — both to novices and to large companies’ workforces needing to update their skills — exists almost everywhere, said Aaron Hillegas, CEO of the Big Nerd Ranch, an 11-year-old company that runs weeklong coding instruction bootcamps.

The Atlanta-based company is offering immersion classes at a Denver hotel for industry veterans wanting to learn to program software for mobile phones. It’s also scouting Lower Downtown for office space for a 50-employee operation running coding instruction sessions in Denver, the Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the western United States.

Denver became Big Nerd Ranch’s “West Coast” office because it has a skilled tech workforce and ready access to Pacific coast cities from Denver International Airport, but it’s far cheaper than those cities as a place to live and do business.

“We really needed to make it easier for our employees to get out there,” Hillegas said. “We can find the talent in Denver, and it’s a place where someone can afford to comfortably live like a grown-up.”

“A few decades ago, the same sort of people I would hire now would’ve gone to NASA, when that was the cool thing,” he said. “It’s the same set of skills, it’s just been relabeled.”

But software engineers driven to find creative ways to solve hard problems still are too few to meet the demand, he said.

New York City-based Stack Exchange Inc., an online site where 25 million software programmers a month go to collectively solve technical problems, opened a Denver office in August. Its staff sells tech companies in Denver and Silicon Valley on using Stack Exchange as a scouting and recruiting ground for programming talent.

Joel Spolsky, CEO and founder of Stack Exchange, said Denver made sense for the company’s first office west of New York City for the same reasons Big Nerd Ranch came here — an educated workforce and quick, direct flights to West Coast cities.

Spolsky is on the board of a New York City public high school that opened this year with a curriculum focused on software programming. He said having an even rudimentary knowledge of programming is becoming a career advantage in nontech industries.

“In almost any kind of modern company, there are a lot of positions where you can just get kind of stuck unless you know a minimal amount of coding,” he said.

The lingering public perception of computer programming being a profession regularly gutted by outsourced jobs and layoffs misses the fact that new job opportunities for coders with current skills always have been available.

“Even in 2000, when I looked around at my programming friends, they all immediately got new jobs if they were good at it,” Spolsky said. “I’ve never known there not to be a good market for programmers.”

Years of outsourcing software development by some companies have shown that they, too, produce too few high-quality coders to dent U.S. demand, Spolsky said.